Sunday Summary – September 6, 2015

Celebrating the end of summer (and the end of the State Fair) with Labor Day tomorrow, here’s the (rather light) week on streets.mn starting with an important

Collaboration

Streets.mn and Nice Ride MN Launch Crowdsourcing Bikeshare Project announces our new joint project with Nice Ride Minnesota to crowdsource analysis and recommendations for the evolution of the Twin Cities bikeshare system. Nice Ride is looking for ideas, advice and recommendations for station locations, system operations and overall system development from the thoughtful readers and writers of streets.mn. to help plan bikeshare system growth for 2016 to 2020. The full post has 7 questions and some other on-line resources which could jumpstart some thinking and writing on streets.mn (and this has already begun to happen in the comments section), but these are only starting points. We’re asking you to give input by writing posts to tell us how you think the system could grow and improve (and by continuing to carry on the conversation in the comments). No, you don’t have to have written anything for streets.mn before and no, you don’t have to have all the answers – this is about asking better questions, offering observations and providing context from you the people who know the Nice Ride system (including its limitations) and the metro area. Come to the kickoff event on Wednesday, September 16, 2015 to find out more.

Nice Ride bike station

Interchanges

To mark the start of the reconstruction process, GIF of the Day: Hennepin-Lyndale Bottleneck Through the Years shows us the neighborhood before the highway interchanges were constructed in 1938 through the creation of the bottleneck during the 1960s and 1970s to the present. Streets.mn writers have had rather a lot to say about this stretch of road including posts on the public process, desirable designs, criticism of proposed designs (as well as complaints about what’s there right now) which could make useful reading along with these images.

Green Line feeder buses succeed is not about roadway intersections, but the interface between buses and light rail. As the title states, Aaron Isaacs (writer of the Quarterly Transit Reports) counts the numbers of people transferring from bus service to the Green Line at bus transfer points and they’re up. As well, the numbers are from 2014 in the very early days of the Green Line, so we await further reports as the Green Line matures.

A bird’s eye of the second most iconic thing in Minnesota.

Popular culture

You Have to Watch ‘Show Me A Hero’ on HBO (from David Simon, creator of The Wire) because, “In short, racist zoning and density fights aren’t going away any time soon, which makes SMAH required viewing for anyone who cares about our cities.” Read the post for more detail, then get HBO.

Minnesota State Fair-goers Enjoy a Pedestrian-Friendly Experience and our sketcher Ken Avidor draws us some pictures and wonders how much of the rich and active pedestrian experience at “The Great Minnesota Get-Together” could be employed in cities and towns year-round? Commenters suggest the Fair is not all good when it comes to transportation and urban life including the traffic snarls on the edges of the Fairgrounds required to make the car-free fairgrounds possible. Roadkill Bill: Part 4 of Vincent Van Gogh in America, also from Ken Avidor, continues the story of Roadkill Bill we’ve been enjoying each week since May (while we wait for more Bicyclopolis!).

Broadacre City in Minnesota refers to Frank Lloyd Wright’s proposed Broadacre City, a new American landscape where everyone would have an acre of land, a car, and a gyrocopter. Broadacre City didn’t get built as planned, but a Broadacre City gas station did, in Cloquet, Minnesota and you can take a look here.

Ken Avidor’s State Fair

The Fair ends tomorrow and perhaps I should go one more time since I did NOT win a Kemps inflatable cow on Friday (I have not won for at least 6 consecutive years). However, I did see an actual calf being born at the Miracle of Artificial Insemination Birth Center as well as meeting politicians, talking to MnDOT personnel while picking up the new bike map, and viewing the crop art. Grab that last little bit of summer tomorrow, then write something for us or become a member of streets.mn and have a great week!